May 18, 2016

Senate should defund HUD racial and income housing quotas in vote this week

FAIRFAX, Va. – Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning urged the Senate to support an amendment by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), S.3897, to the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) appropriations bill that will prohibit implementation of the HUD regulation "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing" (AFFH) that conditions $3 billion of yearly community development block grants on 1,200 recipient cities and counties rezoning neighborhoods along income and racial guidelines:

"There is zero excuse for allowing the federal government to dictate local zoning policy via community development block grants to impose racial and income zoning quotas on cities and counties. Zoning ordinances only determine what can be built where, not who lives there. People can move wherever they want, and rent or buy. Real housing discrimination, that is, denying housing on the basis of race, has been illegal for decades. It is not at all what is at issue in the upcoming vote in the Senate.

"The Lee amendment simply says that community development block grants, which have been around for more than 40 years, can be spent by local communities as they see fit to put affordable housing where they think it makes sense. That's the way these block grants have always been allocated, but suddenly, the Obama Administration found some new power for HUD to condition the community development block grants based on fulfilling the department's utopian vision of racial and income equality.

"Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing is not about expanding the poor's access to housing, it's about expanding the federal government's reach into local municipalities. Republican or Democrat, defunding this overreach should be an easy vote for every senator."